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The biggest message New York City voters sent on election night was not their choice of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who got a little more than 50% of the vote.
City voters gave larger margins of approval to a trio of housing-related initiatives meant to set off a building boom to generate more affordable housing and leave a mark that should last much longer than Mamdani’s four-year term.
Taking cues from Austin, Texas, residents voted to sidestep their own city council and zoning boards to fast-track the construction of affordable housing, simplify zoning review and create an appeals board to give rejected building projects a second chance.
New York’s housing crisis is extreme and unique, but it is also part of a broader problem across the country. Many voters of all stripes do not feel they can afford to live. Supporters hope the new system will help nonprofit developers get past red tape and set off a building boom that still respects the character of neighborhoods. Finding that balance is going to be a massive challenge.
I spoke by phone with Amit Singh Bagga, who is principal of Public Progress Solutions, a campaign strategy and public affairs firm, and who was campaign director for the “Yes on Affordable Housing” campaign to learn more about New York’s housing crisis and how the passage of these three amendments should be viewed by the rest of the country. Here are some excerpts of that longer conversation.
WOLF: First, explain the problem. Why is there a crisis?
BAGGA: New York City has been experiencing a very acute housing crisis for several years now, which is primarily the result of our inability to build sufficient housing generally, as well as sufficient affordable housing.
Just to understand the scope and scale of the crisis: Only one out of every 100 apartments in New York is currently available for rent. We have a 1.4% vacancy rate. The average three-bedroom apartment to buy now costs $1.8 million — and that’s not just in Manhattan, that’s citywide. Fifty percent of renters and homeowners are cost-burdened, which means they’re spending more than 30% of their gross monthly income on rent. That’s pre-tax. We now shamefully have 154,000 public school kids in our system that are considered homeless. So they might be living in shelters. They might be what’s called doubled up, meaning they’re living with friends or family, or they might be moving around quite a bit.
WOLF: Why was passing these three initiatives such a big deal?
BAGGA: New York City has just become the very first city in the nation to pass this type of overhaul to our local land-use and zoning regulations. Similar initiatives have been attempted in many places across the country, most notably in California, and have failed spectacularly. Which is why, from a national perspective, this is incredibly notable.
The bill SB 79, which has gotten enormous amount of coverage in California, is a state bill to override a lot of local zoning regulations that had to be introduced in Sacramento and was bitterly fought over in the California State Legislature. So it is, I think, really notable that New York City voters took matters into our own hands.
WOLF: Explain what these proposals do.
BAGGA: The proposals essentially make it faster, less expensive and more affordable to build housing in all parts of the city. Currently, we have 12, what are called community districts — groupings of, let’s call it two to four neighborhoods — that have built as much housing in New York City as the other 47 community districts combined in the last 10 years. That tells you that we are not producing nearly enough housing in New York City to meet our current demand.
We’re producing about 15,000 to 20,000 units a year in the last several years. Our outstanding demand is somewhere between half a million and a million units. A rate of producing housing of 15,000 to 20,000 is simply not going to get you there.
The reason that we are only producing this much housing is not because we have run out of space. New York City is geographically enormous. There are many, many, large parts of the city that are incredibly low-density where we can absolutely add housing. But the current system can be far too easily weaponized by small groups of individuals to force local council members, who have had an outsized amount of power when it comes to land use and housing, into very difficult positions and impossible choices. The choice being: Block affordable housing or lose your seat. We’ve seen this play out in the New York City Council several times, including just a couple of years ago, where, in the East Bronx, which is a relatively low-density area, the Democratic city council member who supported a rezoning that increased some density and added some affordable housing ended up losing her seat to a Republican, which was the first time in 40 years that that district had been represented by a Republican. The political stakes can be very high.
What these measures are really designed to do is to remove the politics from the equation of having a citywide solution to this very urgent citywide problem.
Residential apartment buildings on 8th Avenue in New York, in July. – Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images/File
WOLF: Zoning boards were developed for a reason. Why do you think that system has failed?
BAGGA: The system has failed because it places an enormous amount of power in the hands of individual local council members. We have 51 council members who represent New York City, collectively. And essentially, the local council member is the individual that has the power to say thumbs up or thumbs down on anything from even just maybe one building or two buildings in their neighborhood, all the way up to a much larger project or a larger neighborhood rezoning. We have had a practice in New York City — it’s not a law, it’s not a rule, it’s just a practice — called member deference. If a local council member says yea or nay to a particular project or proposal, the entire council votes with that member to say thumbs up or thumbs down. The logic behind this is that every individual council member, in theory, knows what’s best for their neighborhood and is also navigating their own local politics in a very particular way, and they don’t want other council members to have a say over what goes on in their backyard. One could argue there’s a little bit of an inherent logic to this, and it is really designed to insulate local council members from interference from their own colleagues when it comes to local political decisions. The flip side, however, is that this system has been weaponized by almost always, small minorities of people in individual council districts to block the creation of affordable housing
WOLF: Will this lead to a new era of public housing projects like we saw built in cities in the ‘60s and ‘70s?
BAGGA: No. All of these projects are going to be proposed by for-profit or nonprofit development. It’s only one out of the four types of housing that would be taxpayer-financed, but those projects are not owned and operated by the city. So it’s not long-term public housing; it’s housing that is permanently subsidized by taxpayers. That is all negotiated at the front end, and there is a very clear cost to it, and that is done project by project. This is not creating huge complexes of public housing at all. This is generally individual buildings and individual projects. Ultimately that housing is owned and operated by nonprofit developers. It’s not owned and operated by the city.
WOLF: What is the waiting list like for subsidized housing in New York City?
BAGGA: The waiting lists are insane. There was an example given last year where for 10,000 units of housing, there was a waiting list of 6 million people.
There is also an example given by the Chinese American Planning Council, which is the largest and oldest immigrant rights organization in New York City, one of our coalition partners. It took them 10 years to build just 150 units of 100% taxpayer-financed affordable housing for immigrant seniors, people who have low fixed incomes and no opportunity to make more money. For 150 units, they received 55,000 applications. So that just gives you a sense of the severity of the crisis.
WOLF: What lessons should other cities take from this election in New York City?
BAGGA: I would reframe that slightly to say New York is learning a lesson from other places, and in particular Austin, which experienced a tremendous amount of economic growth as a result of becoming a tech hub and did not initially build nearly enough housing to keep up with its new demand. Austin, of course, has had the benefit of the enormous amount of land into which it can sprawl.
But beyond the sprawl, Austin loosened many of its restrictions on development when it came to, for example, height, and as a result, was able to add a lot of density in places where there previously had been none.
When it did so successfully, which took just a couple of years, rents in Austin plummeted by an average of 20%. What we in New York did on Tuesday night is follow an example of another city. They didn’t have to loosen their restrictions in the same way we did. It was easier for them to do it because Texas is a different type of state with a different set of laws and rules. But we are taking the Austin example and saying, “Unless we are able to get the local politics out of land use, we’re not going to be able to solve this problem.”
California is also part of the lesson. Multiple local such initiatives failed in California, in Southern California, in San Francisco. The state had to take matters into their own hands. And that’s where SB 79 came from, and that was an incredibly difficult process in terms of getting that bill through the California state legislature.
I think the lesson that we’re seeing just across the board is unless we can wholesale overhaul a number of the restrictive regulations that we have at the local level, the affordability crisis is just going to worsen.
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